A linchpin of success for any business is its ability to communicate effectively with its customers. One of the primary means of communication a business has with its customers is through a contact center. In a contact center, typically a customer telephone call is launched through the telephone network and is received by the call center portion of the business' contact center. Then a series of prompts query the customer for their account data and purpose of the call. The customer inquiry is next routed to an appropriate agent (either virtual or live) for handling the customer's issues that prompted the inquiry. As part of handing the customer off to an agent, the customer's account data may be displayed on the agent's computer terminal or desktop via screen pop in order to avoid duplicating the query process and to minimize the call time. Another essential means of communication a business has with its customers is through its enterprise telecommunications system, known as a private branch exchange (PBX) or Unified Communications (UC) system.
All communication systems and/or networks are, unfortunately, susceptible to periodic malfunctions and failure. When a system for communicating with customers malfunctions or fails, the customer may become frustrated and dissatisfied, which may also cause such customer to post negative reviews via various social media and review websites.
Internal monitoring and diagnostic software executing on computer systems for a contact center has been developed to determine the cause of a failure or malfunction once one has occurred. The internal monitoring software interfaces onsite with the internal systems of the contact center, such as the private branch exchange (PBX) and Interactive voice response (IVR) subsystems. The monitoring software monitors the performance of the contact center subsystems as the subsystems react to and process an incoming customer call or calls. However, there is no ability to inject calls into the contact center system from the public telephone exchange or control the activity of the incoming calls. Moreover, the internal monitoring and diagnostic software is not capable of testing the contact center's operations as a customer would experience them and determine whether any irregularities or other indicators of impending malfunction or failure are occurring.
External testing systems have been developed to aid businesses in verifying the proper operation of certain aspects of their contact center systems. Tests can be performed to verify that the system is available, can handle a certain simultaneous volume of calls, is accurately responding to customer input, is correctly prompting the customer and is accurately responding to customer input. Such external testing often involves launching one or more pseudo-customer calls through the public telephonic communication system to the customer contact center. From there, input can be provided as if the call were an actual customer, and call progress detection can be employed to verify the correct functioning of the contact center response systems as compared to expected responses. One such method for external testing the automated prompting systems is provided in U.S. Pat. No. 5,933,475, which is incorporated herein by reference in its entirety.
Conventional external testing systems for contact centers provide useful data about the occurrence of a failure or other irregularity or malfunction in the various facets of a customer contact center. But conventional external testing systems are unable to determine the root cause of the noted failure/irregularity/malfunction because there is no interface to diagnose the contact center's actual systems. And without such diagnosis, automated correction of the failure cannot be performed.
Additionally, public telephone infrastructure and hardware limitations can cap the number of simultaneous calls that a given testing services vendor can employ from a given location. Thus, additional outbound test call centers may be needed if the test call volume exceeds capacity for a given test call launching center. Maintaining multiple locations is, of course, very expensive.
Conventional external call testing systems also do not have the ability to test the accuracy of the information presented to the agent's terminal once the customer call is handed off.
Therefore, there remains a need to improve monitoring and testing systems for contact centers, PBXs and UCs.